Why does everyone keep mentioning "mainstream" points of view? They should be valued no more than others. If the mainstream points are published in the media (notice how I didn't say the mainstream media), they should be included and cited. If not, they should be put there with a {{fact}} tag until someone finds a reference. The point of view should not be included based on its popularity.
From: SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:44 AM, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
A big part of the point of NPOV is that if you don't agree with postmodernists like Lyotard (quoted below), you can write carefully and clearly, striving for neutrality as best you can manage, and be satisfied that the result is useful.
And if you are in agreement with Lyotard, and regard the pursuit of knowledge as a language game, you can still play. "If there are no rules, there is no game"... and the game we are playing is NPOV.
Wittgenstein created the idea of a language game to describe what he called a "form of life," which he never defines, but which is roughly how we see the world around us -- how we use language and its rules to allow us to think and talk about the world.
The question is whether there is a universal form of life -- to what extent there is a shared seeing. Is there a way of seeing the world that is shared by all Europeans? By all human beings? By all living beings?
Wittgenstein says no: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." In other words, your form of life defines what you can articulate (and vice versa), and what you can see, what you can think about, and what you can know. That might be very limited -- regarding some issues, it might only be people within your own culture who can see certain things.
This tells us that the idea of a neutral point of view is impossible.
For example, look at our article on [[Girl]]. There is no hint there that throughout history and still, the birth of a girl has not been a cause for celebration; that they are left to die, and sometimes actively killed, or aborted. Now, we could add this to the article -- that culture X does or did this, culture Y this or that. But the tone of the article would never truly reflect that this has been the serious position of many societies. No matter how dominant a position this was within the world, our article would never reflect it. Anyone who tried to create that reflection would be accused of POV pushing.
One of my interests is the way we treat and view animals. There would be uproar if I started adding information about the treatment of non-human animals to all relevant articles -- and not only that, but if I were to change the tone of the articles so they were written as if by a Martian who had no preference between the human and the non-human.
The way we avoid even the possibility of NPOV is by insisting that the POVs we reflect must have been published by reliable sources, and that NPOV must reflect the proportion of the POVs as reflected by those sources. I support this, because there is no other way to write a reliable encyclopedia. But what it means is that any notion of NPOV is lost, because the sources we respect reflect the dominant POVs of people we regard as educated in our own language, which Wikipedia simply repeats.
What we really mean by NPOV is a position that all educated holders of the dominant POVs within the English-speaking world can accept as valid and responsible. It's a wonderful achievement when an article manages to cater to those positions. But it is not neutrality.
Sarah
I believe as long as there are sources for opinions, they are verifiable. Whether they are reliable or not should not make a difference.
No, it is not neutrality if we cater to the "certain opinions", because the kind of neutrality you're thinking of ("no" point of view, right) doesn't exist. It is also not right if we only cater to "certain opinions", either. We should document all opinions that are published, regardless. If you want to publish your opinion, you should be able to put an <hr> and put your own opinion. --Jonas
On 4/14/08, Jonas Rand joeyyuan@cox.net wrote:
Why does everyone keep mentioning "mainstream" points of view? They should be valued no more than others. If the mainstream points are published in the media (notice how I didn't say the mainstream media), they should be included and cited. If not, they should be put there with a {{fact}} tag until someone finds a reference. The point of view should not be included based on its popularity.
The hell it shouldn't. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not ground zero for the culture wars. The point of an encyclopedia is not to be a complete compendium of viewpoints, but to be a quick primer on a number of subjects. That is, the goal of an encyclopedia is its usefulness in understanding.
Selectiveness is a key part of that.
I believe as long as there are sources for opinions, they are verifiable. Whether they are reliable or not should not make a difference.
This is true only if one limits one's self entirely to primary sources.
No, it is not neutrality if we cater to the "certain opinions", because the kind of neutrality you're thinking of ("no" point of view, right) doesn't exist. It is also not right if we only cater to "certain opinions", either. We should document all opinions that are published, regardless. If you want to publish your opinion, you should be able to put an <hr> and put your own opinion. --Jonas
Again, no, because an encyclopedia is a socially involved project, not ground zero in the culture wars. That is to say, an encyclopedia aims to provide a particular value for the culture in which it is published, condensing and organizing the body of information that culture posesses. The goal is very much one of cultural knowledge as opposed to absolute knowledge. Which is not neutrality in an absolute sense (which is what you're objecting to) but in a cultural sense. The goal is not an ontologically neutral presentation of the facts, but rather a presentation of the major viewpoints on a subject that any informed person would recognize as a comprehensive summary of those viewpoints.
Which is not ontological neutrality, but what we might call social neutrality.
There is no ontology to Wikipedia.
-Phil